Rethink where writing “starts”

I’m a third-generation college textbook author, but I couldn’t figure out how to start writing one.

Sure, I could easily start composing pages and pages of ideas about how students could improve their writing: I have no end of advice I’m happy to share about writing. But I couldn’t figure out what should come at the start of the book. Where should writing students—and their instructors—begin? Or, since our students arrive in our classes already having begun, already bringing high-level communication skills and processes with them, where can we begin again?

I am deeply at home with some of these conundrums. I am a child of writing-teacher parents who identified themselves as “a radical outliner and a radical brainstormer.” I’m also half of a “read-more-in-order-to-write-better // write-more-in-order-to-read-better” marriage, and so I frequently switch-hit in these spaces. I’ve wandered into additional doubts over the years: does theory come before practice, or grow out of it? is narrative always easier to write than argument? do you really have to “learn the rules before you can break them”? is it ever ok to write your draft and then “add the sources back in”? should writers never edit while they’re drafting?

Ann Berthoff and “All-at-once-ness”

Writing scholar Ann Berthoff names this conundrum “allatonceness”: “[The writer’s mind is] naming, inferring, referring, recognizing, remembering, marking time, wondering, wandering, envisaging, matching, discarding, checking, inventing: all at once, we are carrying out these acts of mind as we are writing something down—or up—making meaning in the process” (The Sense of Learning). I suspect this is true of many human processes: playing second violin, repairing a torn ACL, freeclimbing El Capitan, running a shareholders’ meeting, competing in a WNBA championship game. But I know it best in writing.

Writing instructors often talk about recursivity, the idea that writers move back and forth among a set of tasks: inquiring, explaining, inferring, composing, reviewing, revising, realizing, editing. We tell students that they don’t have to write their introductions first, but can start with any part of a draft. We acknowledge that there are many processes for writing, not just one pathway. But recursivity is easier on teachers and students than allatonceness, because it acknowledges distinct moves that are merely reordered, and so can be taught separately (“today, we’ll focus on steps for peer reviewing”). If writing really happens all-at-once, we have a greater challenge: how do we acknowledge that messiness, so that we’re telling writers the truth about how writers work, and yet support students who may need to practice moves one at a time, passing a ball today and shooting a basket tomorrow?

Starting down a writing-learning pathway

Not only does writing itself happen all-at-once, but writers need both knowledge all-at-once and skills all-at-once. So teachers and learners have tricky decisions to make.

Many current writing textbooks start with a focus on skills, by taking up a type of communication project: Narration, perhaps, or Exposition. ask students to start learning about writing knowledge and skills together. This makes a kind of sense: When we engage writers rhetorically (“Give an acquaintance directions to your house” rather than “Write a process paragraph” or “write an imperative sentence”), we keep the work of communication alive and human for them.

Rethinking Your Writing appears to take an alternate approach, with three opening chapters about threshold concepts, habits of mind, and general rhetorical principles of writing. If pressed, I would admit that I believe advanced writers are particularly ready to benefit from some quick introductions to what professionals know about writing and writing learning. But I never intended for a course to start with four weeks of students studying the theories: that’s like sitting in the bleachers reading about swimming without ever getting your feet wet. Writers need to link practice and theory throughout their learning and composing experiences.

So the existence of “Chapter 1” in RYW is an illusion, as is all the other sequencing implied by the numbers and clusters I created to enable clear references for teachers and students.  RYW is designed specifically as an online resource and built to have a start anywhere, go anywhere approach:

• Information is presented in short, discrete modules that can be assigned independently and endlessly recombined.
• Every chapter and section is intentionally cross-linked to other sections, with particular attention to connecting theories and practices.
• Most importantly, every chapter deliberately asks writers: What do you already know and have planned? How does this material connect to your past, present, or future writing? What are you worried about or needing now?

Instructors can and should plan sequences that help a group of writers learn as a cohort and share similar experiences. I have hoped from the start that instructors will create their own pathways through the resources in RYW based on what they know about their students, what learning they intend to support via the assignments they have prepared, and what they most want advanced writers to gain during their study. The cross-links and suggested resources embedded in the text should help instructors identify sections that can support these local goals. And the open-access option of RYW (thanks, WAC Clearinghouse!) means that instructors can select as many or as few of these sections as they find useful.

However, only the writer can examine their own all-at-once-ness and most accurately identify what feels most relevant, helpful, or accessible for them to try at any given moment. The reflective process at the heart of Chapter 4 and the journey toward a personal writing theory explained in Chapter 12 help prepare writers to better articulate their individual and rhetorical goals, strategies, and concerns. There is no one “writing process,” no absolute measure of whether the work of writing is succeeding or failing, and no one way to get unstuck when writing gets hard. Successful writers self-assess, pick a reasonable path, and try it on for a while.

Writing is always re-starting

I have started and re-started this blog post several times over a period of weeks, reminding myself of how much of writing is just getting started….again! Each of my restarts gave me an opportunity to ask: what did I really want this post to convey? In the end, what I like about the idea of all-at-once-ness is that it clarifies that the multi-layered messiness of writing is a feature, not a flaw. And the more we help writers believe that “having too many choices” or “not knowing where to go” is a sign that they’re doing it right, the more we give them power and joy in their entirely unique work as composers of their own texts and authors of their own learning—wherever they start, and whatever step they choose to take next.